This article was originally published by Eduard Bucher at The Mises Institute.
Richard Duncan recently appeared on the podcast Wealth Formula to discuss the Austrian school of economics. Despite being only 42 minutes long, the episode is packed full of errors and fallacies.
What makes the discussion relevant for Austro-libertarians is not that these two non-Austrians know nothing about Austrian economics, but that their uninformed critiques are characteristic of the kind of simplistic descriptions of Austrian thought that we can expect to encounter in the future, as similarly un- and misinformed individuals on the right distance themselves from us in an attempt to attract new adherents as the Zeitgeist shifts to the right.
Duncan argues along the following lines:
1) Austrians proceed from the premise that gold is money and that credit expansion thus cannot continue indefinitely.
2) Austrians believe that credit growth leads to economic bubbles that always pop: More credit means more consumer spending and more investment, leading to a growth in prosperity, but when the credit growth stops, as it must under a gold standard, the bubble pops, and the process reverses as consumer spending, investment, employment, and prosperity shrink.
3) However, gold stopped being money in 1968 and, since then, capitalism has turned into “creditism,” changing the way our economic system works: The explosion of credit that has taken place has made the US and global economies much larger than they could otherwise have grown.
4) Austrians recommend letting this bubble pop: “[Austrians tell us] that we have sinned by no longer backing money with gold and that, therefore, we must suffer damnation because of all our egregious sins.”
5) However, Austrians fail to appreciate that the current bubble is so enormous that if it popped, civilization would collapse:
5a) If the US adopted a gold or Bitcoin standard and were unable
The remainder of this article is available in its entirety at SHTF Plan
